(2) Sat Mar 29 2008 22:51Intertextuality in Games:
I love it when a game references another game. What was the first time
I saw this? Maybe in an Infocom game; those all had references to
Zork, but I didn't actually play Zork until pretty late, so it was
lost on me.

I dunno where to draw the line because a lot of games are flat-out
clones of other games. If your game doesn't bring something new to the
world of games it's less "intertextuality" and more "plagiarism." Also
I'm not as interested in the way later games in a series reference
earlier games in terms of plot or graphics or music, or when one game
includes a related game as a minigame or Easter egg. In a very 80s
move I borrowed the Wii Zelda game from Steve Minutillo (thanks,
Steve!) and I'm about halfway through. Its mechanics are very
different from any other Zelda game I've played (ie. the first three)
but there are lots of references to the old games; for instance
the old musical themes are now used as accentuating
stings. Unfortunately they haven't reused the awesome death theme from
the original Zelda (stay tuned for my mashup of the Zelda death theme,
"Stairway to Heaven", and the one song from Earthbound [Update 2008-06-01: the Winters song]). And also all
of this is just callbacks to earlier Zelda canon.

Of course, if one game references a totally different game,
that's more interesting. I think almost all the Infocom games, even
the mysteries, have some reference to Zork. I liked how Jeff Lait tied You Only Live Once into POWDER in a
really obscure way. But this is still the same as when a
book/painting/song references another book/painting/song. Games are
capable of a totally different kind of reference, because they can
steal gameplay elements from other games.

In Game Roundups past I've mentioned a couple games with full-on
ludic intertextuality: Tong
and The Bub's
Brothers. Tong is a straight-up hybrid of Tetris and Pong. TBB is
a Bubble Bobble clone but it's got powerups that, eg. turn Bubble
Bobble into Breakout. Game ideas like Tetris and Breakout are so
well-cloned that it's not difficult to imagine sticking them into some
other game.

There's also parody. Kingdom of Loathing incorporates a huge number
of other games, not just in the playable sub-games like the text
adventure but by adapting other games' mechanics to the KoL schema. My
own Guess the Verb! did something
similar with text adventures, focusing on treasure collection and
magic words for the cave crawl, on NPC interaction for the college
game, etc. Super Smash Bros. is a parody game, which is why I'm
interested in it even though I hate that kind of game. Ditto with
Parodius, as the name implies. Also the GameCenter
CX game for the DS (which will probably never be released in
English), which parodies the whole culture of late-1980s console
gaming.

Super Smash Bros. and Parodius get away with intertextuality by
being made by the same company that owns the source material. The
other games I mentioned get away with it by referencing generic games
like Pong and Breakout or open source games like Nethack. Or, most
often, they just file the serial numbers off the source material. But
a new kind of game is starting to show up. This kind of game achieves
intertextuality the same way contemporary art does: copyright
infringement.

Games like Mega Mario have done this
for years, but without really thinking it through. The earliest
example I can think of was a couple games I
found in 2006 where you play various non-Mega-Man platformers as
Mega Man. Now, let me point you to I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie:
The Game. Due to its extreme difficulty I recommend experiencing
IWBTG:TM:TG solely through the medium of speed-run
videos, making it IWBTG:TM:TG:TM. Apart from having a satisfying
number of original dirty tricks up its sleeve, this game is notable
for ripping off graphics, sound, and gameplay elements from most of
the well-known 8-bit games and several 16-bit ones. And it often
combines them in ways that create new gameplay elements. I look
forward to seeing more of this sort of game, hopefully ones that I can
actually play.

Update: If you like this entry, you might like my just-published science fiction story "Mallory".